Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The way to make a social home robot seems to be pretty standardized: basically, you cram a tablet computer into a cute robot body with some degrees of freedom and do your best to make sure that your voice recognition and conversation algorithms are as good of an experience as you possibly can, using a screen to help you out when necessary. This is fine, if you can get it to work well, but there's a concern that it's just going to turn into an experience that's essentially talking to a gussied-up version of your phone. A group of researchers including Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, Benny Megidish, Oren Zuckerman, and Sung Park from IDC Herzliya, Cornell, and SK Telecom have developed a prototype social robot called Vyo. Vyo is "a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices." Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that's totally, adorably different.

The drumbeat of the road to India's inaugural DeveloperConnect continues to beat this week as we take a look at the significant learning experiences being offered to developers at the June 17th conference held in Bangalore. Imagine taking a day off to attend a conference and coming back with more hands-on training and software knowledge than you could acquire in one year. We have designed this exact opportunity for attendees at the Experience Zone. Learn firsthand how IBM is partnering with the auto industry to create connected cars like Formula One race cars and enabling entrepreneurial new ventures in auto like the on-demand car sharing services Car2Go. Our cognitive computing superpower, IBM Watson (which has long led the revolution in modernizing healthcare) is teaming up with our new partner Sesame Street to create mobile apps, games, smart toys, and a range of products offering adaptive, individualized education for preschoolers.

Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know. We know autonomous cars are coming, and in several ways are here already. But BMW CEO Harald Krueger is thinking beyond just autonomy to the effects of full-on artificial intelligence in cars. Citing the win of Google's AlphaGo AI over a Chinese player and the development humanoid robots that react to how you feel, here's what Krueger is thinking about these days, according to Automotive News: "The companion in the Vision Next 100 car is just that: a real companion that gets to know you as a person and responds to you as an individual," Krueger said.

Warcraft: The Beginning, the adaptation of the video game World of Warcraft, has proved a massive hit in China, with a first-day take of 46m ( 31.8m), the second biggest in the country's history after another Hollywood hit, Furious 7, which took 63.1m in its first 24 hours in 2015. Warcraft's impressive results put it on course to challenge Furious 7's 150m opening instalment in China – and thoroughly dwarfs the projected result for its domestic release in the US, which is currently tracking for around 25m when it opens on Friday. Warcraft's success in China has been ascribed partly to the game's popularity there – according to the International Business Times (IBT), an estimated half of the world's players are based in the country – and partly to the favourable position the film acquired in the release calendar due to the participation of a number of powerful Chinese enterprises in Warcraft: notably the purchase of production outfit Legendary Pictures by conglomerate Dalian Wanda. However, box-office analysts don't expect Warcraft to trouble any Hollywood-import grossing records, such as Furious 7's total of 390m, let alone domestic record holder The Mermaid, which finished with 526m earlier this year. Related: A bigger splash: how did The Mermaid become China's biggest ever film?

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Apart from its Russian engines, the J-20 is completely made and designed in China. And even then, future J-20s will be flying with a more powerful domestic engine, the WS-15, by 2021. In line with its increasingly sophisticated domestic arsenal, China's arms exports have become much more technically competitive in the last ten years; the 2015 U.S. Defense Department's Annual Report on the PLA even stated that China's ground systems in particular are globally competitive or nearly globally competitive. With selling points of low cost and affordable service, lack of geopolitical strings and upgrade packages, China has become the world's third largest arms exporter behind the US and Russia. With a series of recent contracting wins against Russian firms, it looks to expand its market share.

In the past two decades, we've seen chess grandmasters and the best Jeopardy players in the world alike fall in competition to computers. Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em poker may be next. But the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is about way more than games. Last April and May, Carnegie Mellon University's AI, Claudico (developed by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and his team), played an 80,000-hand tournament against four poker pros. When the game ended, three of the four players had bigger hands than Claudico.

"If you can't beat them, join them" may not sound like the most encouraging pitch for a cybersecurity company, but a startup called Cylance has created an artificial intelligence-powered brain that essentially does just that, and it has taken off -- raising 100 million in a Series D round of funding and catapulting itself into the so-called'unicorn' club of companies with 1 billion valuations. The Series D round of funding was led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, along with existing investors (unnamed which but previous backers include strategics like Capital One, Dell Ventures, DFJ, Fairhaven, Khosla, KKR and Ten Eleven). It takes the total raised to over 177 million. Cylance is not disclosing its valuation but a reliable source close to the company says it's in the neighborhood of 1 billion -- a figure also reported by the FT. Founded and led by Stuart McClure, a serial entrepreneur and former CTO of Intel's McAfee, Cylance's system is part of the rising wave of companies -- including biggies like IBM's Watson and Google's Brain -- that use machine learning and AI to build services that replicate or enhance human thinking to solve more complex problems that might be too challenging or cost prohibitive for a person (or even an army of people) to solve.